


His Weight in Gold

by tinymarvels (Captain_of_the_sass)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Advanced Idea Mechanics, Angst, Character Development, Character Redemption, Homophobic Slurs, I can't believe I wrote this yet here we are, Internalized Homophobia, Justin has a crush idk, Non-Consensual Drug Use, but just one, not really just hinted at a little, or i guess, tony stark/justin hammer - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 12:11:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18691249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Captain_of_the_sass/pseuds/tinymarvels
Summary: "Let me put it this way; you attended MIT. Next to Stark and Oscorp your name is one of the most successful in the world. and yet-" she said, just as Justin had begun to preen, "You are one of the absolute biggest dumbfucks of the era."In which Justin Hammer becomes AIM's newest involuntary science experiment.





	His Weight in Gold

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote three quarters of this like two years ago and I dug it out again, idk. Probably a one shot because let's be real no one loves Justin Hammer like I do
> 
> But I imagine if it went on I'd make Tony/Hammer endgame. Maybe Tony/Pepper/Hammer idk. Endgame made me sad and weird ships are my happy place

        Justin Hammer was, for lack of a better term, a total jackhole. The type of guy who stole candy from babies then laughed about it as he threw said candy in the garbage. In all the world the only thing he loved more than money and sex was popularity. He soaked up attention like a sponge, clamoring for it like a love-starved child. So it goes without saying that, when a beautiful woman showed up outside his office begging, "Just one minute with him, please! I'm a HUGE fan," and batting her pretty eyelashes, Justin waved off his security team, arming himself with nothing but his most charming smile. And now he's in the back of a van. A van that smells like unwashed socks.

        "Lady, I don't know who you work for but I promise you I can pay you a lot more."  
        One of the woman's ugly ducklings, a guy who looks like what would happen if the Hulk and a vulture had a baby, gives him a swift kick to the gut that makes him gasp for air.

        "That's it," Justin grunts, "Hope you like lawsuits, kids, because when I get out of here I am going to run you into the ground."  
        He does not, in fact, get out of there. Instead they jab a needle into his neck and leave him drooling into the upholstery.

 

**_Day One:_ **

  
        He wakes up in a futuristic space dungeon. There's no other way to describe it; smooth polished floor, ceiling that glows with no visible light fixtures, and eerily perfect white walls. He's in the fucking twilight zone. What he can see beyond the sliding glass door only further proves his spaceship theory; it looks like their decorator took a page out of Stark's book with all the holograms they've got flashing around.  
        "Hello? HELLOOOO," Justin hollars, "Jesus Christ, you kidnap a guy then keep him waiting? Hey, who do I have to  _fuck_ to get some service around here?"  
        There's a door outside his prison cell, and when it hisses and swings open Justin shuts up so fast his teeth click together. He huddles into the corner, staring wide-eyed at his captors.  
        "Look, if you guys want designs, money, huge ass missiles, just name it. Let me get you in touch with my company, I'll get you whatever you want, and nobody gets hurt. Sounds good, right?"  
        One of the little pissheads has the brass cahones to _laugh_.  
        Pisshead One stomps inside and grabs a handful of Justin's hair, dragging him out of the cell. He can do nothing but stumble along, eyes tearing up at the tight pain across his scalp. Pisshead's buddy is giggling like a hyena and Justin would spit on him if he wasn't so eager to keep all his body parts.  
        At the end of the hall they reach a door and Pisshead swings Justin inside so hard he rolls across the floor. The door clangs shut between them, the lock clicking loud as if to reassure him that, yes, he is still trapped in fucking crazy town.  
        With a groan Justin rolls into somewhat of an attempt at being upright, fuzzy vision focused on the door. His delightful new friends are gone, however. For a half second he contemplates inspecting the door for any faults, but then a throat clears behind him.  
        There's a woman leaning against the opposite wall, dressed in green from head to toe. She's hot as fuck, but the green lipstick is a real boner killer. Or maybe not, because now Justin's thinking about blow jobs and green lipstick rings and- She quirks an eyebrow and for a bizarre second Justin worries she can read his thoughts, but then the woman simply gestures to a chair in the center of the room.  
        "Please." she says, "Sit."  
But no, nuh-uh, no way he's gonna sit down and let Hot Topic loom over him.  
        "Y'know...I think. I think I'm good, actually. I'm just gonna-"

        "It wasn't a question." she says.

"Right. Okay. Sitting." his butt hits the chair before he lets himself think about it any further. He's seen videos of that Black Widow girl, and though the whole _choke you with my thighs_ thing is kinda sexy, Justin's a little partial to breathing. Green Chick looks just as no nonsense as the now-famous redhead.  
        "Look, I told your friends. Anything you want, I can get it for you. No- no torture necessary. We can skip all that, all the fucked up negotiations and weird glowy things in people's chests. So what do you want? Money? Blackmail material? A bullet that can knock that Luke Cage guy on his ass?"  
        Those green lips stretched into a smile. "Oh, sweetheart. We want you."  
        Justin's brain short-circuited."I'm sorry, is this a come on?"  
        Green looked like the idea was revolting, staring at Justin like a wad of gum stuck to her shoe. "We want your brain. Let me put it this way; you attended MIT. Next to Stark and OSCORP your name is one of the most successful in the world. and yet-" she said, just as Justin had begun to preen, "You are one of the absolute biggest dumbfucks of the era. How can someone so supposedly intelligent lack any decent capability for an invention beyond a tenth grader's level?" Her face cracked into a smile that had Justin discreetly leaning away as far as his chair would allow. "We developed something. One injection, once a day, for one week. At first all our subjects died. But they were small, inconsequential; we knew we could do so much better. We've taken genius and put it in a bottle. Brain capacity being doubled, tripled even. Sure there are some nasty side effects; you know. Fever, nausea, a headache from the belly of hell. But _sweet fucking christ_ , the results. The experiment has had three consecutive successes now, and I think we're ready for the next step. That's where you come in." She began to prowl toward him, heels clicking on the floor. "The disgraced mogul. Head of a company best known for weapons that misfire at every turn, a man who let daddy buy his way through college and spent his career living off the crumbs left by the real professionals. Who better to test our creation on; to prove what we can really do?" The woman draped an overly familiar arm over his shoulders and leaned down, lips to Justin's ear as she whispered oh so sweetly. "You are a piece of AIM property now. You will be our masterpiece; our Sistine Chapel, our 5th symphony. We are going to remake you."  
        Justin's body seemed to move on it's own, lurching out of the chair in an effort to get some distance between them. He backed away until he struck something- someone, going by the beefy arms that wrapped around him like the coils of a boa constrictor.  
        "Listen, okay, I'm all for technological advancements and pushing boundaries. But I kinda like being alive, okay, I'm not so sure about this, guys."

They don't listen. They strap him down during the injection, needle carving it's way into the base of his skull.

 

**_Day Two:_ **

 

        It starts like a hangover. His fingers seem overly clumsy, and the light stings his eyes ever so slightly. He sulks in the corner of his cell, wrapped up in a scratchy old blanket that doesn't quite manage to stave off his shivering.

 

**_Day Three:_ **

 

        His skin is on fire and even the touch of his clothing against his skin is agony. He's crying and screaming and he doesn't care; he doesn't care, because his head hurts so bad he has to physically hold himself back from clawing his own eyes out.

 

_**Day Four:** _

 

        The fever is burning him from the inside out and it hurts, it hurts so bad, but they come for him anyway and they shoot him up with that fucking needle. He's pretty sure he's going to die here and no one will even give a shit.

 

_**Day Five:** _

 

        There's blood; dripping from his nose and his ears then he's convulsing on the floor like he's being electrocuted. His muscles seize and his jaw clenches and all he can see through the haze are people in white labcoats fluttering all around him like some kind of fucked up alien abduction.

 

**_Day Six:_ **

 

        He feels hollow. Empty. Almost as if someone has taken everything inside him and scooped it out with a melon baller. He sits there, staring straight ahead for hours at nothing at all. He doesn't feel any smarter. If anything he feels too tired to hold onto even a single thought; they all seem to slip between his fingers like grains of sand.

The walls are humming.

 

**_Day Seven:_ **

 

        The injections hurt much worse with every session, each one adding to the blanket of deep mottled bruises. The entire back of his head and neck are swollen and discolored and sometimes, for fun, one of the faceless labcoats will poke at it until he's whimpering and squirming to get away.

 

**_Day Eight:_ **

 

        Just the thought of food makes his stomach roll, so he leaves the tray untouched on the floor. His head throbs in time with the sluggish beating of his heart.

When the door opens for his checkup, there's a faint scent of cigarette smoke in the air.

 

**_Day Nine:_ **

 

        They've stopped giving him injections. But they come in still, every day. They ask questions about how he's feeling, to which the answer is almost always some variation of "shitty". They follow it up with blood pressure tests, shining stupid lights into his eyes, and making him recite the alphabet backwards. Lastly, every day before his (doctor? babysitter? Asshole in a lab coat?) leaves, they give him a pencil and a packet of paper. It's full of weird questions about shape patterns, reading comprehension, and word questions featuring stupid kids sharing slices of a cake. At first he would fantasize about stabbing Lab Coat Nerd with the pencil and making a daring escape. Now he just tries not to think about using it to stab himself.

 

**_Day Ten:_ **

 

        There was a party, once; in college. Justin kissed him. He'd been drinking all night, the room was spinning, and he'd really lov- liked the guy. Aaron. He'd been Justin's roommate for three years, his best friend for longer. Justin was usually strictly into women, but there was just something about the guy that had him leaning in before he even stopped to think.

Aaron uses it to blackmail Justin's father. In the end Justin gets beat within an inch of his life, and Aaron gets enough money to fly off to paradise.

Hammer men don't raise fags.

 

_**Day Eleven:** _

 

 He just needs a sip of water. He's thirsty, so fucking thirsty, he just needs a drink something small just some water a little bit just a _sipsipsipsip_

please

god

_please_

 

**_Day Twelve:_ **

 

        He thinks about writing a letter. Just to say...goodbye, maybe. But he has no one. No one that matters, anyway. Mom? Dead. Old nannies? Who the hell knows; they came and went so fast it was like their house was one big revolving door. And now even his dad had kicked the bucket. After a lifetime of stumbling after the man's coattails Justin hated that he actually missed the guy.  
        His dad was the kind of man that always bailed his son out of every mess he made. The kind of dad that hired only the best nannies, had a constantly evolving string of mistresses, and made casual donations of 100,000 dollars to MIT coincidentally right around the time Justin's application was submitted. He handed Justin everything on a silver platter without his son even asking for it, then threw it all back in his face every time his son started acting too big for his britches.

He was the kind of dad that paid off blackmailers and took punishment into his own hands.

  
The kind that died and left Justin a company he never once thought his son deserved.

 

_**Day Thirteen:** _

 

        He feels like he's given everything. There's nothing left anymore; Justin sits there and just....feels nothing. Empty.  
He wonders if Tony Stark ever felt like this when he was in captivity. There'd been a lot of stories about Afghanistan all over TV during the months the man was gone, and Justin could manfully admit he'd dedicatedly checked the news every day.  
        It was probably different for him. Tony Stark built a fucking suit of armor in a cave out of garbage. But Justin...he laughed. He was fool's gold. Nothing but a cheap imitation. The feeling of hollowness lasts for hours, until Lab Coat Dick comes in for the daily visit and says, with a sick tinge of something like pride, "You're progressing well. I think it's about time for the next stage."  
And suddenly he's angry. _So fucking angry_. The world tilts on its axis, realigns into something else.

Something new.

Justin wonders how many others went through this. How many others sufferered the same way. And he's angry. Angry for himself and, for the first time in his life, angry on someone else's behalf.

 

**_Day Fourteen:_ **

 

        The floor is smooth and ice cold against his cheek. It feels good- Justin could fall asleep like this if he let himself; but now's not time for sleeping. He's playing dead, scarcely breathing as he hears Lab Coat's foot steps approach. The scene he's staged has the desired effect- Lab Coat yells, and soon there's a handful of them swarming into the room.

        He can't let them get too good a look at him or the game'll be up, so he starts convulsing. Forces his muscles to spasm so wildly that he feels a sharp pain in stomach. When Justin vomits all over the floor it's, unfortunately, totally real.

        In the end he gets a cocktail of various drugs pumped into his veins, and some kind of electronic monitor hooked up to him with a mess of wires.

Justin hides the keycard he's stolen in his sleeve.

 

**_Day Fifteen:_ **

 

        She's been expecting him. It's obvious from the way she hardly looks up as he creeps closer, drinking her tea with an air of disinterest.  
        "I'll admit, I'm a little impressed," the woman with the green lipstick says at last, "I honestly thought you didn't have the balls to make an escape attempt."  
        Justin laughs at that, shaky and cracked around the edges. "Yeah, well. Life's full'a surprises." he answers. He sits down across from her at the sleek silver table and those lips spread into a smile, a strange twisted thing that seems almost inhuman.  
        "You might not see it, yourself," she says, "But our project so far has been a complete success. You, my friend, have made some substantial progress. You've already surpassed all of our previous subjects." her eyes meet his, "I think we can go even further."  
        Justin held her gaze. "And what happens if I can't take it?" he asks, "I barely even survived the first time around, what if I kick the bucket?"  
        "Now, that would be a shame. But what's that old saying? Plenty of fish in the sea?" The two were silent for a moment. Justin listened to the humming in the walls.  
        "Did you know," he says finally, conversationally, "one of your scientists smokes. I was worried he'd have an expensive lighter; engraved or some shit. But he didn't. It was a piece of crap, from a gas station or something. I took it on the eighth day; he didn't even notice. Probably had plenty more at home."  
        She was watching him with something darker now, and Justin knew if this didn't work there would be hell in his future.  
"That same guy? He had the night shift last night. And eventually, he took a smoke break." Justin grins and it's a vindictive little thing, every little piece of it just jagged broken glass. "Chlordane." he says, "I thought it was a little weird that you would have it in your labs. Originally a pesticide, I think. Odorless. Colorless. Highly flammable." he was flying high now and she was trembling with anger, pretty pale skin turning an ugly red. "Finally got off my ass and fucking built something of my own. Just a little ignition trigger. For such tiny things, lighters have a lot of goodies packed in there. Lots of useful parts. Your lab had even more." Justin slid a hand to the underside of the table and peeled off the switchplate he'd taped to it- the wires intertwined with those that had already been in the room so well the were hardly noticeable.

"Yippee-ki-yay, you stupid bitch." Justin hit the button.

 

 


End file.
